This invention relates generally to the field of surgical accessory tools and more specifically to an anesthesia delivery device.
Anesthesia is extremely important for pain control in medicine. The use of general and local anesthetics along with oral pain medication are the main treatments for pain. It is common to apply local anesthetics before, during and after surgical procedures. The treatment of postoperative pain has allowed patients to return home sooner and decrease their consumption of oral pain medication after discharge. Intraoperative local anesthetics have also allowed for a decrease in the amount of medication needed for general anesthesia.
There are several methods for administering local anesthetics. A technique known as a nerve block will decrease or eliminate pain in the distribution of that nerve. The nerve is blocked proximally resulting in anesthesia distal to the block. If the surgical site is innervated only by that nerve the block is usually complete. One problem commonly encountered is that many surgical sites are innervated by multiple nerves making it difficult to provide complete analgesia with a single nerve block. Local infusion of anesthetics often used to supplement these types of blocks.
It is also common to harvest autologous tissue from another site for use in the surgical procedure, thus necessitating anesthesia at two different surgical sites. Tendons are frequently used as autologous grafts for surgery. Tendons are harvested using minimally invasive techniques, generally by making a small incision near the tendon insertion and “stripping” them out. The tendon harvester is usually a long thin instrument which is passed around the tendon and then pushed up the tendon until the tendon turns into muscle at which point the tendon is cut free. This technique can cause pain over a relative large area which is innervated by several nerves and is oftentimes isolated from the surgical site.
The minimally invasive nature of this harvesting technique poses problems for delivery of local anesthetics to the harvest site. To this date there have been no instruments designed to deliver a local anesthetic to the harvest site at the time of tendon harvesting thus minimizing both intraoperative and postoperative pain. There is therefore a need for an instrument that attaches to the tendon stripper or any other minimally invasive instrument which is placed beneath the skin and will deliver local anesthetic at a site which cannot normally be accessed through the minimally invasive incision.